Rafia Santana has to be one of those rare digital artists exploring race via advertorial web vernacular. The dimensions are akin to a website’s big box ad, there’s a cheery and bright pure colour palette and an appropriation of call to action marketing tropes, like drop shadows and animated bursts. The swinging noose even looks like a spiral gimp bracelet from girlhood cultural expressions of yore. It’s a cunning recast of Lisa Frank graphics, but a perversion of the nostalgia to forcefully recall a time when slavery was the driver of American economic growth, and even connecting this historical with the tyranny of self-branding, self-promoting affective labour.
Comments on this entry are closed.